Mandira Sharma

This description of Mandira Sharma's work was prepared when Mandira Sharma was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2003.

Introduction

Mandira Sharma engages high-level officials in Nepal's justice system in reforms that enable citizens to hold police and courts accountable. Failures to contain a seven-year insurgency have produced public criticism and low police moraleall of which lend momentum to her work.

The New Idea

Mandira has persuaded two dozen key decision-makers in Nepal's justice system to join in discussions about why they have lost the people's confidence and what to do about it. They are the very people in charge of the flawed system. To give them a window into how the rule of law goes awry in Nepal, she is highlighting the treatment of detainees in police custody.
The treatment of detained people who have not yet been charged with a crime is a strategic issue. Evidence is collected during detainment, which thus becomes a crucial stage of the legal process. Detainment is also the point of rampant violation of prisoners' rights, and it has been an invisible injustice. Confronted with the evidence of errorsand with the futility of blaming each other for themhigh-level police, judges, and lawyers are designing new systems to improve their own and subordinates' compliance with the law.
Mandira has an organization with a staff of 21 lawyers in Kathmandu, in the central zone of Nepal's five development regions, and she has created branches in two more. She sees that in these places, police behavior has improved. Within two years, she expects her work to spread into the remaining two regions. Working from the top down, she has secured both broad parliamentary support for more extensive legal aid, and, from her steering group, concrete policy steps that will make it mandatory for police to demonstrate that they are following the rules. While she sees police reform as a necessary precondition for changing popular attitudes about the law, Mandira is also building community-level monitoring of the justice system.

The Problem

The detainees' stories that Mandira has brought into public view illustrate a whole sequence of common illegal practices: flaunted habeus corpus, torture, falsified evidence, isolation from families, and lack of information about the right to counsel. For women detainees especially, the abuses are compounded by sexual harassment and inadequate hygiene provisions which cannot be offset by family care because of the detainee's isolation.
Since 1996 the number of detainees has increased dramatically, in part a response to the Maoist insurgency and the intensified security concerns it has precipitated. Mandira's documentation of their situation illustrates that Nepal's many good lawsand a 1990 constitution which enshrines citizen protectionsare often implemented poorly, if at all. Rarely can police produce medical records of detainees, for example, even though they are formally required to keep them. While legal defense is critical for ensuring a fair trial and required by law for prisoners who demand it, it has been presented as a court procedure rather than a matter of a defenant's rights. Furthermore, detainees are technically not prisoners, and lawyers expect them to come asking for legal aid, although this is impossible because detainees are not aware of their rights or the proper procedures asserting them. Most lawyers claim their professional standards prevent them from actually seeking out such clients. To complaints that a detainee has not received legal counsel, police retort that there are no mechanisms to supply it. Judges in the court do not scrutinize whether detainees are represented by counsel.
On the one hand, the police and the courts are not held accountable for their actions. Conversely, the people who need to demand accountability are alienated from the legal institutions designed to help them. Ordinary citizens are reluctant to get involved or report problems. They perceive that the police and the courts can do whatever they want and no one can stop them.

The Strategy

Mandira aims to improve the rule of law in Nepal. In 2001 she founded the Advocacy Forum with seven defense lawyers, including a teacher, all of whom were in line with her idea of a fair trial. The forum is the executive member of Collective Campaign for Peace, a network of 40 national organizations working in many districts, the main objective of which is to secure the rule of law and justice. Mandira sees application for her idea in countries facing similar problems, especially Bangladesh.
After founding Advocacy Forum, Mandira broadened her outreach to law graduates whom she recruits as volunteers. In the beginning, she spent a lot of time finding out how different levels in the police and justice hierarchy viewed their roles. Her questions were designed in part, to help these figures think differently. She approached the detention custody centers with a question: How can we help you exercise your responsibilities? She and her colleagues documented everything they saw, from torture to the four weeks it took to secure a mandatory three-day writ to hospitalize an inmate. She identified 25 people in Kathmandu who were critical to making changes, and after meeting with them one by one, she persuaded all to convene regularly. She facilitated discussions about how they were heavily criticized and had lost people's confidence, and how they might together find a way out. She explained Nepal's international obligations as signatory to various conventions and used the examples she had documented to illustrate how the legal system had undermined its legitimacy and even contributed to the conflict in which the country is embroiled. Allegations against the lawyers went on the table, too.
Some officials already wanted to improve the situation, and Mandira and her colleagues built on their enthusiasm for change. They brought in legal counsel for detainees, moving them through court proceedings in a timely fashion; they even went to villages to help police collect evidence in a careful, detailed, transparent manner. Mandira found that lawyers needed to be trained to see that participating in the collection of evidence must be part of their job at this stage.
Where officials refused to stop protracted detention or torture, Mandira used the United Nations Human Rights mechanism and sought help from international human rights organizations to press the Nepali system. At a routine level, her team selectively resisted corruption, using incidents where clerks insisted on bribesand lawyers paid them, thinking it unavoidableto demonstrate that these seemingly small gestures contribute to corruption on a grand scale. On one occasion, their complaint eventually reached a judge who was one of the people in Mandira's core group of leaders. Embarrassed, he acted swiftly to make an example of the incident. Such everyday instances of corruption affect not only people in the criminal justice system, but also ordinary citizens, who need to have papers processed by government offices.
Mandira found that since the police headquarters was participating in reforms in Kathmandu, police in other regions would also participate. She developed a report on the consultation meetings in Kathmandu and asked police to contact their regional counterparts, encouraging them to take part in replicating regional meetings. For expansion, Mandira's group selected the midwestern and eastern regions, both with elevated instances of illegal detainments, extra-judicial killings, and disappearances. Fortunately, they found proactive lawyers who were vice-chairpersons of the Nepal Bar Association, which has local chapters in each of Nepal's 75 development districts and a vice-chair in each of the five regions. The lawyers are influential, and Mandira has recruited the chairs for her program. Local bar chapters have identified 15 more districts for proactive, fair trial work.
In all districts, her group adopts the same basic approach amid varying local issues and attitudes. They always start from the custody level, but also work with the District Administration Office, which has jurisdiction over some cases, and with prisons. Following suggestions from participants in the consultations, they will incorporate jailors and doctors in future meetings.
In the eastern region, many detainees come from the Drug Management Department, so Mandira works with its manager. The counterpart in the mid-west is the Forestry Department. The understanding of human rights, and of acceptable investigative methods, also differs from region to region. In Kathmandu, all stakeholders acknowledge now that torture is a problem and openly discuss investigation methods; in rural areas, the situation is less advanced. Mandira and her group have begun documenting these differences and showing how they result in inconsistent application of the law. Mandira also presses for cross-monitoring among departments. International donors who are contributing to training are now being invited as monitors.
Mandira has enlisted the bar association to help close loopholes in the Legal Aid Act. The amendment will require that detaineesas well as prisoners who have been chargedbe offered counsel and be accompanied by a lawyer during all court proceedings. The amendment has been drafted, is well supported, and awaits the next parliamentary session for approval.
Advocacy Forum works with international groups to develop programs for those who are incarcerated for petty offenses, so that they can return home or complete a prescribed amount of community service. Together, these groups have started paralegal classes in three districts and are working to support groups of citizens who can serve as watchdogs.

The Person

Born into a conservative family in the remote western region of Nepal, Mandira was not encouraged to pursue education. When she was a child, she wanted to become a nurse so that she could help other people and have freedom and independence for herself. But nurse's training was not available in her village, so her motherwhom she describes as a natural leader and thinker, though uneducatedencouraged her to pursue law, a subject that were offered. Fighting extreme gender discrimination, Mandira pursued her education and was the first girl in her village to pass law school. She saw herself as one of the privileged ones, with a responsibility to do something about the problems of her society. She continued her study of law in Kathmandu, having been granted a scholarship for being an outstanding student.
She also saw how the community looked at people who were accused of having broken the law. Visits to see her uncles, who were tortured and incarcerated for anti-panchayat activism, left an indelible mark. She spent three years, from 1996 to 1999, managing a rehabilitation program in women's prisons for the women and their dependent children. She surveyed all 16 prisons in the eastern regions of Nepal and 10 more in the central region, and was struck by the injustice meted out to prisoners. She saw that torture under police custody was a big problem, affecting the entire system.
With a scholarship from the British Council, Mandira went to Essex, England, to obtain an LLM in human rights law. After all, she knew a great deal about the grassroots problems from her extensive fieldwork in prisons, but less about international human rights mechanisms. In Essex, she began to see the possibilities of using international instruments as tools for national advocacy. She returned to Nepal to put them to work.